In almost all fields of industrial activity, small and large objects are transported. Attaching a tag (or “marker”) to each object becomes more and more important. Often, the tag comprises a radio frequency identifier (RFID) with a small chip and an antenna so that the tag exchanges data with a computer via radio waves. Tagging objects found widespread application such as for goods receipt and shipment management, production control, merchandise management, lot control, expiry data management, point of sales, etc.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,936,527 B1 (Isaacman et al.) discloses locating and tracking documents and other objects by a radio frequency document control system.
DE 4341880 A1 discloses to store manufacturer specific data in a tag for reading by an external device and for subsequent data processing.
GB 2 308 947A (Howell et al.) discloses a tag that identifies itself by a transmitted code.
WO 00/45324 (Besnard) discloses to associate a read/write RFID tag with a product to be processed, to process the product, to write process information to the tag, and to further process the product depending on the process information of the previous process.
EP 0908643 (Sorells) discloses construction details of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) security tag for attachment to a small article of merchandise to monitor the tagged item.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,166,884 B1 (Maney at al.) describes an intelligent system for processing and storing articles. The system is mounted with a transportable container for carrying articles (e.g., semiconductor wafers) that comprises a non-volatile memory used to store the identity, status and history of the articles in the container. Further described is transmitting data from the memory to an information processor.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,974,166 B1 (also Maney et al.) describes processing systems with intelligent article tracking.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,469,363 B1 (Saliga) discloses an inventory control system. An electronic tag that keeps an unalterable log of each step in the handling of a controlled item, which may be a flight safety critical aircraft replacement part. The tag is electrically powered via inductive coupling to a computer with which it communicates, and comprises a non-volatile computer memory element configured so that data may be written into unused portions of it, but so that no existing data can be overwritten or erased.
DE 199 55 120 A1 teaches a carrier-transponder with data that describes environment conditions (e.g. temperature) recorded during a time period previous to reading. The transponder has an individual identification (electronically readable) and has dedicated memory portions allocated to dedicated organizations (e.g., shipping agency) to allow specific object identification.
DE 198 44 631 A1 (Gantner et al.) describes a tag with a protected memory portion for a tag identification number and owner identification number.
DE 199 51 060 A1 (Boede et al.) discloses to provide a computer system at manufacturing time with an automatic customer identification for later use to identify the computer to a manufacturer website.
DE 196 23 893 A1 (Bischof) describes transmitting digital coded signal when transmitting data from medium B to medium A, medium A is caused to request further data from medium C, wherein C stores a database with profile data of the user of medium A as well as stores data to be transmitted to A.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,963,134 B1, U.S. Pat. No. 6,195,006 B1 (P), and U.S. Publication No. 2001 0000 019 A1 (P) (all Bowers et al.) describe inventory systems using articles with RFID tags. Each tag has a unique identification or serial number for identifying the individual article. An inventory database tracks all of the tagged articles and maintains circulation status information for each article.
The advertising material “RFID Integration with SAP” provided by SAP Aktiengesellschaft, Walldorf (Baden), Germany, discloses the use of RFIDs in the context of business applications.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,177,860 B1 (P) (Cromer et al.) describes a method of asset control and workstation computer deployment that utilizes a dual port electronic memory identification RFID tag to hold serial number and hardware and software configuration profiles as well as user information.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,259,367 B1 (P) (Klein) discloses affixing to an object a passive two-way communication circuit such as a radio security tag or smart label. The tag or label, when operational, is arranged to receive a remotely generated request for status information and, responsive to the request, to transmit status information to a remote device. The circuit is associates with an URL for launching a web browser program.
Documents with (P) have been published during the priority interval of the present application.
However, the use of tagged objects is not free of technical or organizational challenges. Objects and tags often cross company borders. Both locations (i.e. companies) might use different data formats. Heterogeneous data processing requires data conversion at least at one location. The available technology sometimes limits the memory in each tag by capacity and speed: First, it might be not feasible to store as much data as desired because the memory size is small. Second, for read/write operations, there might be not enough time to communicate as much data as desired. In other words, the memory is sometimes small and slow in terms of bits and bit rates; but a large and fast memory is not available or not affordable. Different data format and different objects often cause non-uniformity in memory size. Some data on the tag is not relevant for reading. Writing to tags and reading from tags cause network load. The present invention seeks to alleviate some or all of the identified problems.